FIVE WINDOWS

Roemer's debut offers a disquieting take on Rear Window set in contemporary San Francisco.

Our narrator is a workaholic book publisher who lives, post–marital breakup, in a beautiful but stripped apartment on a placid hillside. He rarely ventures out, subsisting on delivery-service food and on the human contact provided by video calls with authors and collaborators. All day he stares out from his command post near the five high windows of the title, observing the people who come and go and—the panopticon works both ways, it turns out—being observed by them. There are sinister undertones everywhere. The novel opens as the narrator observes a nearby house fire, one in a series of them. He hears mysterious muffled explosions from across the street; his upstairs neighbor shows up bloodied, pleads for the publisher to call 911, then departs with his lover, who has, the neighbor says, injured himself in a wood-carving accident; a transit hub is about to be built nearby, and the community is tense, wary, angry. Then an international celebrity author, not the kind this small outfit publishes, submits a novel manuscript that features eerie parallels to the publisher's situation. All the while the reader has to grapple, too, with questions about the narrator's reliability—why do his neighbors seem to think he's a malignant presence, this watcher who doesn't hide behind the usual niceties (and window treatments)? Like Hitchcock, Roemer excels at establishing and then deepening the reader/viewer's unease—but his interest is less in the plot complications that fuel Hitchcock's film than in the psychological drama unfolding within the apartment as the publisher's life implodes. Roemer's achievement here is to discomfit the reader without sacrificing the story's fundamental realism. This book reads, often, like a dystopian novel, but—disturbingly—it's one set in a dystopia we already live in.

A frightening fable about the watcher and the watched.